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This paper applies a theory of persuasion using the elaboration likelihood model to explain how communication messages from mobile banking services are interpreted by receivers to increase their trust in mobile banking. We explain how users’ security and privacy concerns moderate the central route persuasion relationship between argument quality and trust. A questionnaire survey is employed to test a research model. The findings indicate that central and peripheral route persuasion cues enforce users’ trust in mobile banking services. Users with strong privacy and security concerns are more likely to rely on the quality of arguments of the messages. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the paper.

Recent lockdowns over the world due to COVID19 pandemic accelerated virtualization of our social and work life. While virtualization contributes to reducing green-house-gas (GhG) through reduced mobility, it also dramatically increases energy consumption by data centers (DCs) which host large number of servers for realizing virtualization. This paper argues that current engineering-oriented studies on Green DCs need to be complemented by IS scholars to address human and organizational issues.

Introduction. Much of the research in obesity has explored the role of social networks in promoting health through social influence and selection. However, little research has examined how social networks themselves could condition health behaviours. Research began to address more detailed questions regarding peer socialization process and network properties. One of the key questions is whether behaviour association (either peer socialization or selection) is dependent on the local network structure. Examining social network position, structure, and how they interact with behaviour provide valuable insight on how to modify these behaviours. The objective of the study was to examine the moderating role of friendship network properties on the association between individual’s and friends’ weight-related behaviours among adolescents. Materials and methods. Methods are drawn from a set of analytical tools known as ‘Social Network Analysis’, which uses friendship nomination data from a complete network (socio-metric), along with reported data on diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep deprivation. Results. A total of 673 adolescents aged between 11-15 years, from four schools in Kingdom of Bahrain, participated in this study. Findings from binary logistic regression models suggest that there are associations between adolescents and their friends’ in multiple weight-related behaviours. There is also evidence for the moderating role of some network properties on these associations. Conclusion. Properties of friendship network are critical in conditioning associations between individuals and their friends’ weight-related behaviours. However, findings are gender specific, which has implications for gender-tailored interventions.

Optimizing vessel speed can be considered a multi-objective optimization problem since fuel emission and service level often trade-off. Understanding such relationships is important for decision makers in maritime shipping. Majority of existing studies on solving this problem consider it as a deterministic problem. However, in real world, this problem contains stochastic variables such as port waiting time. Therefore, we need a new approach to solve the problem including stochastic variables. This paper proposes conceptual model of simulation optimization to solve stochastic multi-objective problem for speed optimization.

Part 3: Open Government and Transparency; International audience; This paper identifies main features of online games to be disclosed to the market for policy makers. It tests the positive relationships between information disclosure for online games and stock returns using event analysis method. Based on data collected from online game companies between 2004 to 2009 in South Korea, the paper finds positive and significant correlation between game rating information and stock reactions. Specifically, the positive reactions are clear when a company introduces casual games, and a company has development capability. However, we do not find any significant relationships between stock reactions and voluntary information releases after the game rating information released. The findings support the feasibility of introduction of mandatory information disclosure scheme for online game industry.

© The Author(s) 2018. A key prediction of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that idiosyncratic risk is not priced by investors because in the absence of frictions it can be fully diversified away. In the presence of constraints on diversification, refinements of the CAPM conclude that the part of idiosyncratic risk that is not diversified should be priced. Recent empirical studies yielded mixed evidence with some studies finding positive correlation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns, while other studies reported none or even negative correlation. We examine whether idiosyncratic risk is priced by the stock market and what are the probable causes for the mixed evidence produced by other studies, using monthly data for the US market covering the period from 1980 until 2013. We find that one-period volatility forecasts are not significantly correlated with stock returns. The mean-reverting unconditional volatility, however, is a robust predictor of returns. Consistent with economic theory, the size of the premium depends on the degree of ‘knowledge’ of the security among market participants. In particular, the premium for Nasdaq-traded stocks is higher than that for NYSE and Amex stocks. We also find stronger correlation between idiosyncratic risk and returns during recessions, which may suggest interaction of risk premium with decreased risk tolerance or other investment considerations like flight to safety or liquidity requirements. We identify the difference between the correlations of the idiosyncratic volatility estimators used by other studies and the true risk metric the mean-reverting volatility as the likely cause for the mixed evidence produced by other studies. Our results are robust with respect to liquidity, momentum, return reversals, unadjusted price, liquidity, credit quality, omitted factors, and hold at daily frequency. Korea National Research Foundation through Global Research Network Program

Part 3: Open Data: Social and Technical Aspects; International audience; The energy consumption of data centres is increasing over and over. However, there are few decision support systems introduced for data centre practitioners to use it for their daily operations, including simulating their new server installation and forecasting power consumption for the target periods. We propose a simulation model based on CloudSim, which is widely used for data centre research. Our simulation model will be tested with datasets, including IT work-loads, cooling performance, and power consumption of servers and cooling devices. In the final stage, we provide a decision support system to monitor, forecast, and optimise the power consumption of a data centre easily on the web.

Sentiment classification has played an important role in various research area including e-commerce applications and a number of advanced Computational Intelligence techniques including machine learning and computational linguistics have been proposed in the literature for improved sentiment classification results. While such studies focus on improving performance with new techniques or extending existing algorithms based on previously used dataset, few studies provide practitioners with insight on what techniques are better for their datasets that have different properties. This paper applies four different sentiment classification techniques from machine learning (Naïve Bayes, SVM and Decision Tree) and sentiment orientation approaches to datasets obtained from various sources (IMDB, Twitter, Hotel review, and Amazon review datasets) to learn how different data properties including dataset size, length of target documents, and subjectivity of data affect the performance of those techniques. The results of computational experiments confirm the sensitivity of the techniques on data properties including training data size, the document length and subjectivity of training /test data in the improvement of performances of techniques. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. This study was partially funded by Korea National Research Foundation through Global Research Network Program (Project no. 2016S1A2A2912265) and EU funded project Policy Compass (Project no. 283700).

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2020, held in Linkoping, Sweden, in August/September 2020, in conjunction with ...

Background: An unhealthy diet, low levels of physical activity and increased participation in sedentary activities are important obesity-related behaviours that negatively impact the health of today’s youth. Friends’ health behaviours have been found to influence the individual health behaviours; however current evidence on the specific role of friendship networks on obesity-related behaviours are inconclusive. The purpose of this review is to profile the existing literature in an attempt to identify the associations between friendship networks and obesity-related behaviours among adolescents. Method: A systemized review of the literature was undertaken after a search of the Scopus database, a total of fifteen articles were eligible for inclusion. The selected publications assessed the association between friendship networks and obesity-related behaviours (diet, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour) among the youth. Results: There is consistent evidence that friends are similar in physical activity; evidence on diet and sedentary behaviour is mixed and limited. Friendship network characteristics seem to associated with obesity-related behaviours. Popularity (receiving ties) is likely to be associated with diet, network size and the proportion of active friends is tends to be associated with physical activity and finally, network density is associated with sedentary behaviour. Conclusion: Friendships are critical in shaping young people’s obesity-related behaviours. There is extensive research investigating friendship influences on diet physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Future studies should investigate whether friendship influence operates via other obesity-related behaviours that have not been explored yet such as sleep. Results from this review are informative for designing effective public health interventions because network-based promotion interventions have a promising potential. Keywords: social networks, friendship, diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, obesity

Citizens satisfaction is acknowledged as one of the most significant influences for e-government adoption and diffusion. This study examines the impact of information quality, system quality, trust, and cost on user satisfaction of e-government services. Using a survey, this study collected 1518 valid responses from e-government service adopters across the United Kingdom. Our empirical outcomes show the five factors identified in this study have a significant impact on U.K. citizens satisfaction with e-government services. This publication was made possible by Qatar National Research Fund and the findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the author(s). Scopus

Electronic government services (e-services) involve the delivery of information and services to stakeholders via the Internet, Internet of Things and other traditional modes. Despite their beneficial values, the overall level of usage (take-up) remains relatively low compared to traditional modes. They are also challenging to evaluate due to behavioral, economical, political, and technical aspects. The literature lacks a methodology framework to guide the government transformation application to improve both internal processes of e-services and institutional transformation to advance relationships with stakeholders. This paper proposes a cognitive analytics management (CAM) framework to implement such transformations. The ambition is to increase users’ take-up rate and satisfaction, and create sustainable shared values through provision of improved e-services. The CAM framework uses cognition to understand and frame the transformation challenge into analytics terms. Analytics insights for improvements are generated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). A classification and regression tree is then applied to DEA results to identify characteristics of satisfaction to advance relationships. The importance of senior management is highlighted for setting strategic goals and providing various executive supports. The CAM application for the transforming Turkish e-services is validated on a large sample data using online survey. The results are discussed; the outcomes and impacts are reported in terms of estimated savings of more than fifteen billion dollars over a ten-year period and increased usage of improved new e-services. We conclude with future research. The authors would like to acknowledge the funding support for the CEES project (C-E-E-S: Citizen Oriented Evaluation of E-government Services: a reference model) funded by “FP7-PEOPLE-IAAP-2008 - Marie Curie Action: Industry-Academia-Partnerships and Pathways” under grant agreement: 230658. We would like also thank the senior management of Turksat, namely President Ensar Gül and VP Halil Yeşilçimen of Turksat for their advocacy and commitment to support the implementation of the various recommendations, without them, the project would not have achieved the e-government goals. The Husni Sawwaf Chair at the American University of Beirut for supporting also the project. Also special thanks go to the Euro Excellence in Practice Award committee for selecting this work to be among finalists at EURO 2015 conference, Glasgow, UK. Finally, sincere appreciations go to the guest editors and the anonymous referees for their critical comments and support that immensely improved the clarity of the presentation of the paper. Scopus

This paper aims to examine the potential of multi-objective optimization (MOO) as a decision support to improving sustainability in maritime shipping. We focus on environmental sustainability and the trade-offs involved with economic and operational objectives. Through a systematic approach, we review the literature on environmental sustainability, decision support and multi-objective optimization in maritime shipping. We identify the gaps and directions for future research. It is expected that the next generation of decision support systems for maritime transport will exploit the theoretical development in MOO to facilitate informed decision making in maritime supply chains considering environmental sustainability and the competing objectives.

The importance of evaluation and optimization of electronic government (e-government) services is imperative if the government organisations are to have an effective impact on the success and take-up of the services offered. Transport For London's (TFL) London Congestion Charging (LCC) is one of the innovative electronic services (e-services) introduced by the United Kingdom (UK) government to the citizens. While some studies have addressed the impact of the introduction of the congestion charge there has been a dearth of research performed to address user (citizen) satisfaction of the online LCC system. Therefore, this research seeks to measure the citizen satisfaction of using the LCC online payment system offered by TFL. The citizen satisfaction in this context is measured using the four dimensions from the COBRA framework that comprise the cost, opportunity, benefits and risk assessment constructs. This paper presents the findings of a survey of 500 users of the TFL LCC online payment system. It also reports the qualitative feedback obtained from the participants that can be used to determine the areas that need further improvement in the current LCC e-service and potential influences on user satisfaction.

This paper provides a management perspective of organisational factors that contributes to the reduction of food waste through the application of design science principles to explore causal relationships between food distribution (organisational) and consumption (societal) factors. Qualitative data were collected with an organisational perspective from commercial food consumers along with large-scale food importers, distributors, and retailers. Cause-effect models are built and “what-if” simulations are conducted through the development and application of a Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) approaches to elucidate dynamic interrelationships. The simulation models developed provide a practical insight into existing and emergent food losses scenarios, suggesting the need for big data sets to allow for generalizable findings to be extrapolated from a more detailed quantitative exercise. This research offers itself as evidence to support policy makers in the development of policies that facilitate interventions to reduce food losses. It also contributes to the literature through sustaining, impacting and potentially improving levels of food security, underpinned by empirically constructed policy models that identify potential behavioural changes. It is the extension of these simulation models set against a backdrop of a proposed big data framework for food security, where this study sets avenues for future research for others to design and construct big data research in food supply chains. This research has therefore sought to provide policymakers with a means to evaluate new and existing policies, whilst also offering a practical basis through which food chains can be made more resilient through the consideration of management practices and policy decisions.

Though, there are opportunities and demands of utilizing social media for supporting public policy making processes, a way to compilate sentiments on social media into service quality measurements is yet to be proposed in the literature. This paper suggests a systematic method to transform sentiments of tweets into SERVQUAL constructs for tracking of perceived service quality of NHS in the UK. In this study, we propose a methodology of identifying more reliable topic sets by repeating LDA and clustering topic sets, and determine the meanings of topics guided by an existing theory in service quality. To show the applicability of our method, we select healthcare as our target area and pick NHS of U.K for measuring service quality of public policy. We collected tweets about NHS for about 4 years and applied the suggested methodology.

Recent studies in maritime shipping have concentrated on environmental and economic impacts of ships. In this regard, fuel is considered as one of the important factors for such impacts. In particular, the sailing speed of the vessels affects the fuel consumption directly. In this study, we consider a speed optimization problem in liner shipping, which is characterized by stochastic port times and time windows. The objective is to minimize the total fuel consumption while maintaining the schedule reliability. We develop a dynamic programing model by discretizing the port arrival times to provide approximate solutions. A deterministic model is presented to provide a lower bound on the optimal expected cost of the dynamic model. We also work on the effect of bunker prices on the liner service schedule. We propose a dynamic programing model for bunkering problem. Our numerical study using real data from a European liner shipping company indicates that the speed policy obtained by proposed dynamic model performs significantly better than the ones obtained by benchmark methods. Moreover, our results show that making speed decisions considering the uncertainty of port times will noticeably decrease fuel consumption cost.

Even after more than a decade of intensive research work in the area of electronic government (e-government) adoption and diffusion, no study has yet undertaken a theoretical evaluation of research related to ‘e-government satisfaction'. The purpose of this study is to undertake a comprehensive review of the literature related to e-government satisfaction and adoption with a particular focus on the most critical factors and their manifested variables that influence user satisfaction in e-government. Usable data relating to e-government research were collected from 147 papers identified from the Scopus database and by manually identifying relevant articles from journals dedicated to e-government research such as Electronic Government, an International Journal (EGIJ), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) and Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy (TGPPP). A meta-analysis of existing e-government studies found that the majority of the construct relationships demonstrated a significant range of average summative correlation, and effect size, but the influence of perceived ease of use, effort expectancy on behavioural intention, behavioural intention on use behaviour, and perceived trust on risk were still found to be non-significant. A broader analysis of e-government satisfaction and adoption research seems to reflect that although a large number of theories and theoretical constructs were borrowed from reference disciplines such as Information Systems, e-commerce and public administration, their utilisation by e-government researchers appears to be largely random in approach.

This research seeks to measure citizen satisfaction with the electronic Prescription Prepayment Certificate (PPC) offered by National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK). The paper reports on the findings of a survey of over 500 users of the NHS PPC service. Satisfaction is measured using the four dimensions from the COBRA framework (Osman et al. (2011) [1]) which comprise the cost, opportunity, benefits and risk assessment constructs. This is the first study to measure citizen satisfaction with the electronic PPC in the UK across these constructs. The results show that most citizens using the PPC electronic service are satisfied with this service and that the service meets their essential needs. The paper also presents the results of qualitative feedback obtained from the participants that can be used to determine the areas that need further improvement in the current electronic PPC service and potential influence on user satisfaction.

The concept of smart city is emerging as a key strategy to tackle the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid development. It is widely recognised that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play a key role in addressing some of the urban societal challenges such as improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions. Although there are various ICT tools providing intelligence and services relating to energy consumption and monitoring processes, they mostly tend to work in isolation. Therefore, this paper presents the outcomes and impacts of the concept of DAREED which aims to deliver an integrated ICT service platform to drive energy efficiency and low carbon activities at neighbourhood, city and district levels. Furthermore, the research highlights the need for ICT-driven policy making using platforms such as DAREED in the context of e-Government. This paper contributes to the current understandings of e-Government literature in terms of how ICT can help public authorities and stakeholders such as policy makers to achieve and drive energy efficiency. From a practical stance, the paper offers valuable insights to public administrations on how ICT can be used to address pressing societal challenges such as efficient energy use and facilitate better policy making.

This paper summarises lessons learned in relation to an ongoing study to collect feedback on e-government systems that have been implemented to e-enable several core administrative functions in the UK as part of the I-MEET project. Previous work summarises findings from surveys of users of such systems and this paper reports on the experience of surveying providers. An extensive survey was designed and administered to explore provider perspectives on the e-government application in general, system aspects, cost, implementation, prerequisites (e.g. policy support), various dimensions of effects, and the respondent's overall opinion of the system. The survey found a complex mix of internal and external contacted service providers and commissioners, each of whom has a different set of success measures for a service, and shared services (such as common web site providers) that were not obvious but could result in correlated observations. These findings provide signposts for future researchers to potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, when complete, the integration by the I-MEET project of user and provider perspectives will give policy makers the opportunity to balance the scale, complexity and expense of electronically delivered transactions on the government side with the usability and satisfaction from the user perspective, revealing linkages between aspects of both.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach – We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings – This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications – The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications – The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value – This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level.

After more than a decade of comprehensive research work in the area of electronic government (e-government), no attempt has yet been made to undertake a systematic literature review on the costs, opportunities, benefits and risks that influence the implementation of e-government. This is particularly significant given the various related challenges that governments have faced over the years when implementing e-government initiatives. Hence, the aim of this paper is to undertake a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature addressing these issues using a systematic review of 132 studies identified from the Scopus online database and Google Scholar together with a manual review of relevant papers from journals dedicated to electronic government research such as Electronic Government, an International Journal (EGIJ), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) and Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy (TGPPP). The overall review indicated that although a large number of papers discuss costs, opportunities, benefits and risks, treatment of these issues have tended to be superficial. Moreover, there is a lack of empirical studies which can statistically evaluate the performance of these constructs in relation to the various e-government systems. Therefore, this research would help governments to better analyse the impact of costs, opportunities, benefits and risks on the success of e-government systems and its pre-adoption from an implementation perspective.

PurposeEvaluating and optimizing e‐government services is imperative for governments especially due to the capacity of e‐services to transform public administrations and assist the interactions of governments with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. Existing widely applied evaluation approaches neglect to incorporate citizens' satisfaction measures. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to contribute to the understanding of citizen‐centric e‐government evaluation and unify existing key performance indicators (KPIs); and to propose a reference process model of a novel evaluation approach that uses the unified KPIs to facilitate the creation of a “know‐how” repository.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt a quantitative research approach for the evaluation of e‐government services that is based on data envelope analysis (DEA). A survey was conducted for the empirical investigation and data were collected from 13 e‐government services in Turkey. Based on the empirical application of the e‐government evaluation method, a reference process model is designed.FindingsThe proposed evaluation method was proved valid and able to provide assessment with richer explanations than traditional statistical measurements. DEA enabled the identification of insufficient e‐government services and the provision of suggested improvements.Research limitations/implicationsThe reference process model is constructed based on the experience gained by applying the method to a sole cultural setting;, i.e. e‐government services in Turkey.Practical implicationsThe proposed evaluation method, in comparison to other user‐oriented ones, provided assessments with richer explanations than traditional statistical measurements, such as structured equation modelling. The reference process model constructed based on the empirical research is expected to accelerate the citizen‐oriented evaluation of e‐government and promote impact‐oriented indicators.Originality/valueThis is the first application of DEA in the e‐government field, although it has been widely applied for performance measurement in other fields, especially operations research. The novelty of DEA is that the assessment results provide suggestions for strategic improvement of the e‐services.

Speed optimization of liner shipping vessels has significant economic and environmental impact for reducing fuel cost and Green House Gas (GHG) emission as the shipping over maritime logistics takes more than 70% of world transportation. While slow steaming is widely used as best practices for liner shipping companies, they are also under the pressure to maintain service level agreement (SLA) with their cargo clients. Thus, deciding optimal speed that minimizes fuel consumption while maintaining SLA is managerial decision problem. Studies in the literature use theoretical fuel consumption functions in their speed optimization models but these functions have limitations due to weather conditions in voyages. This paper uses weather archive big data to estimate the real fuel consumption function for speed optimization problems. In particular, Copernicus data set is used as the source of big data and data mining technique is applied to identify the impact of weather conditions based on voyage data obtained from a liner companies in Turkey that has liner services in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Particle swarm optimization, a metaheuristic optimization method, is applied to find Pareto optimal solutions that minimize fuel consumption and maximize SLA. The usefulness of the proposed approach is verified through the real data of the liner company and real world implications are discussed. This study was partially supported by Korea National Research Foundation through Global Research Network Program (Project no. 2016S1A2A2912265) and an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie action funded project, MINI-CHIP, under grant number 611693.

Public participation is one of the most important tasks for policy making processes, and public authorities are lacking ideas on designing public participation processes facilitating active citizen participation. Based on a persuasion theory, this paper examines if policy issues embedded with persuasive features draw more attention, longer elaboration time and more participation. Particularly preference matching, location matching, social proof and authority are identified as persuasive features in e-participation context and propositions on their impacts on citizens' participation processes are developed. A prototype mobile participation tool is developed to test the propositions and tested by 80 experiment participants in the UK and Turkey. The findings indicate that the mixture of central and peripheral features is most effective in drawing participation while single feature has limitations. This study also argues that the design of e-participation tools needs to consider the psychological aspects of citizens for motivating their participations. This study was partially supported by Korea National Research Foundation through Global Research Network Program (Project no. 2016S1A2A2912265) and EU FP7 Project “UbiPOL- Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy Making” (Project no. 248010).

This paper reports on a panel discussion at the Pre-ICIS 2015 Workshop on Green Information Sys-tems on the current state and future perspectives of SIGGreen, the special interest group of the Association of Information Systems on green information systems. SIGGreen recognizes the central role of information systems (IS) in creating an ecologically sustainable society. Over the past years, IS scholars have made important contributions advancing our knowledge about how information systems can contribute to solving problems associated with the degradation of the natural envi-ronment. Still, it seems that green IS is, by and large, viewed as just another research branch in IS. We put forward the proposition that, to meet our social responsibility, green IS must not be treated as yet another IS research area. The problem addressed by green IS is simply too big. While, for instance, the awareness of the potential of information systems to increase productivity has been in our disciplines DNA for more than five decades, this is clearly not the case for the potential of information systems to achieve a sustainable world. We suggest that the IS community embraces sustainability as a research imperative and integrates sustainability related aspects in research across methods, theories, and areas.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the research design, methodologies and approaches utilised in electronic government (e‐government) research studies published in the last decade (2000‐2012).Design/methodology/approachA profiling approach is employed to analyse 114 (out of 3,934 from 2000 to 2012) e‐government publications (with specific focus on user satisfaction) including examining variables such as country of research, sample size, type(s) of respondents, data collection methods, and statistical tools and techniques employed.FindingsAmong the research design, methodologies and approaches adopted in the extant e‐government research studies, the quantitative research based approach supported by statistical analysis was the most dominant approach applied by authors in the last decade. Few studies were found to use qualitative‐based approaches such as case studies and interviews.Originality/valueThe prime value and uniqueness of this research lies in presenting the type of research design, methodologies and approaches used in studies that focus on issues surrounding user satisfaction in e‐government research. This has been achieved by synthesising existing publications in Electronic Government: An International Journal (EG), Electronic Journal of Electronic Government (EJEG), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (EJEGR), Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TG:PPP), Government Information Quarterly (GIQ), Public Administration Review (PAR), Public Administration: An International Quarterly (PA), Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), and Local Government Studies (LGS).

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V. Unstructured group decision-making is burdened with several central difficulties: unifying the knowledge of multiple experts in an unbiased manner and computational inefficiencies. In addition, a proper means of storing such unified knowledge for later use has not yet been established. Storage difficulties stem from of the integration of the logic underlying multiple experts' decision-making processes and the structured quantification of the impact of each opinion on the final product. To address these difficulties, this paper proposes a novel approach called the multiple agent-based knowledge integration mechanism (MAKIM), in which a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is used as a knowledge representation and storage vehicle. In this approach, we use particle swarm optimization (PSO) to adjust causal relationships and causality coefficients from the perspective of global optimization. Once an optimized FCM is constructed an agent based model (ABM) is applied to the inference of the FCM to solve real world problem. The final aggregate knowledge is stored in FCM form and is used to produce proper inference results for other target problems. To test the validity of our approach, we applied MAKIM to a real-world group decision-making problem, an IT project risk assessment, and found MAKIM to be statistically robust. Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea)

This paper critically discusses the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for agile supply chains and proposes practical guidelines and future research directions for the field. XML has been identified by many as a prominent technology for enabling electronic supply chain integration, but the adoption of it in the industry has been rather slow and limited. This paper discusses the factors that enable agility in supply chains, and explains why XML is the best candidate for facilitating such factors. Then the major XML-based integration initiatives such as ebXML, RosettaNet, and Web Services are diagnosed in terms of their pros and cons for supply chain agility, as well as the reasons for their slow diffusion. Based on the discussion, this paper proposes that: the integration efforts need to first focus on the industries that need agility; stringent business process standards are necessary; and implementation should be made much easier and more affordable for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Further research issues are also suggested based on the discussion.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate any cultural impacts on end‐users' web page design in weblogs.Design/methodology/approachThe design preferences of 201 weblogs in Malaysia have been collected using content analysis method and the existence of Malaysian cultural traits on the web pages tested.FindingsThe results confirm that there is no cultural impact on weblog designs, which is contrary to existing studies that reported cultural traits in static web page design. This paper concludes by suggesting the increased social interaction among webloggers as one of reasons of weakened cultural impacts in weblog design behaviour.Originality/valueCulture has been considered as one of major factors that affect the design behaviour of static web pages which mostly support one‐way interaction between information providers and information consumers. On the other hand, the recent adoption of Web 2.0 technology enabled bi‐directional interaction between information providers and consumers and it is not known if there is still a strong cultural impact on web page design based on this new technology.

PurposeThis paper aims to gauge the feasibility of workflow technology as a potential solution to facilitating citizen participation in policy‐making processes. The gaps in and future direction of a current workflow models to be used to automate policy‐making processes are to be discussed.Design/methodology/approachA thorough review on the principles and philosophies of policy‐making processes and process models is performed to extract the core constructs of the processes. This follows critical analysis of existing workflow models to identify gaps of the models to be used to support policy‐making processes. An e‐participation perspective is also taken to identify additional modelling constructs that are required when a large number of citizens is involved in a workflow task for opinion gathering.FindingsWhile workflow technology has been adopted in the public sector, the use of the technology is mostly limited to supporting administrative business processes, leaving the potential to automate policy‐making processes. There are some studies that take a life‐cycle approach for policy making and they can be the starting‐point of applying workflow technology to policy‐making process automation. The application of workflow technology to policy‐making processes is expected to facilitate the participation of citizens in these processes through the automatic delivery of relevant policy issues into citizens' lives. A new type of workflow model is required to reflect factors specific to the public sector, including rules for role resolution, considering large‐scale citizen participation and modelling constructs to penetrate into citizens' everyday lives for proactive stimulation for e‐participation.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis is based on a literature review, and empirical data collection could complement the analysis results of the paper. This is included in the future research agenda.Practical implicationsThe findings provide policy makers with a stimulus for adopting workflow technology in the public sector. Gap analysis and future directions of a workflow model for policy‐making processes are expected to be informative for any practitioners who are intending to develop workflow management systems in the public sector.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the first efforts to gauge the potential of using workflow technology from an e‐participation perspective to engage a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including citizens, in policy‐making processes.

The purpose of UbiPOL project is to develop a ubiquitous platform that allows citizens be involved in Policy Making Processes (PMPs) regardless of their current locations and time. However, literature highlights one of the foremost reasons that make citizens de-motivated in engaging themselves in policy making—the ignorance of germane policies and PMPs within the government organizations. It is highly suggested that while more citizens find connections between their everyday life activities and pertinent government policies, the more they become pro-active or motivated to be involved in PMPs. For this reason, UbiPOL aims to provide ‘context aware knowledge’ provision with regards to policy making, i.e. through UbiPOL enabling citizens in identifying any relevant policies along with other citizens’ opinion ‘whenever they want’ ‘wherever they are’ according to their everyday life pattern. As a result of this platform, citizens are anticipated to be more acquainted with the newest relevant policies and PMPs for their participation during their routine life activities. Moreover, this platform is also anticipated to provide policy tracking functionality through a ‘workflow engine’ and ‘opinion tag’ concept to improve the transparency of PMPs. As a final point, the platform intends to facilitate policy makers to collect citizen opinions more efficiently as the opinions are collected as soon as they are created in the middle of citizen’s everyday life. UbiPOL provides security and identity management facility to ensure only authorized citizens can have access to relevant policies according to their roles in PMPs. The delivery of the opinion and policy data over the wireless network is secure as the platform use leading edge encryption algorithm in its communication kernels. UbiPOL is a scalable platform ensuring at least 100,000 citizens can use the system at the same time (e.g., for e-Voting applications) through its well proven automatic load balancing mechanisms. The privacy ensuring opinion mining engine prevents unwanted revealing of citizen identities and the mining engine prevents any unrelated commercial advertisements are included in the opinion base to minimize the misuse of the system.

PurposeThis paper aims to introduce a European project CEES to develop a standard for the evaluation of Electronic Government (e‐Government) services from a citizen satisfaction perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe aim, objectives, methodology, and deliverables of the project CEES are detailed. Furthermore, the challenges of the development of a reference process model in different countries are addressed and academic and practical implications of the project for the citizen‐oriented evaluation of e‐Government services are discussed.FindingsA reference process model for the evaluation of e‐Government services from a citizens' perspective receives strong support from experiences in other similar areas such as software process and information systems governance. The reference model needs to overcome such challenges as the differences in culture, the maturity of e‐Government systems, and citizens‐government relationships.Practical implicationsThe research is expected to trigger international collaboration to develop international standards for the evaluation of e‐Government services.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the literature by enriching the views on e‐Government services and their evaluation via introducing a reference model concept. The CEES project will be the first attempt to apply the reference model concept in the information systems evaluation domain. Despite the wide adoption of reference models in software process, software design, and business process automation, the concept is yet to be applied to the IS evaluation domain.

Advancements in information technology have shaped the way customers and organizations interact with one another. Online brand communities (OBCs), especially have found their way into 21st century relationship marketing. While research embraces these OBCs for their cost-efficiency and ability for faster interactions, it has not thoroughly examined the procedure through which participation in such OBCs affects the major constructs of relationship marketing. Drawing from the trust-commitment theory and its central concepts of brand trust, brand commitment and brand loyalty, this thesis discusses the applicability of this theory in a brand community and in an online context. It also introduces the concept of OBC commitment as a very important outcome of participation in an OBC. Using probability sampling and a self-administered questionnaire, this study employs a deductive logic to investigate if higher levels of participation in an OBC translate to higher levels of member commitment toward that OBC and higher levels of trust, commitment and loyalty toward the brand that the OBC supports. This study underlines the importance of understanding the process through which an OBC member gradually develops strong emotional ties with that OBC, as a result of continuous interaction with other OBC members. Additionally, how participation in an OBC evolves to attachment towards the brand that the OBC supports.

The relationships between policies, their values and outcomes are often difficult for citizens and policy makers to assess due to the complex nature of the policy lifecycle. With the opening of data by public administrations there is now a greater opportunity for transparency, accountability and evidence-based decision making in the policy making process. In representative democracies, citizens rely on their elected representatives and local administrations to take policy decisions that address societal challenges and add value to their local communities. Citizens now have the opportunity to assess the impact and values of the policies introduced by their elected representatives and hold them accountable by utilising historical open data that is publicly available. Using a qualitative case study in a UK Local Government Authority, this paper examines how e-participation platforms and the use of open data can facilitate more factual, evidence based and transparent policy decision making and evaluation. From a theoretical stance, this paper contributes to the policy lifecycle and e-participation literature. The paper also offers valuable insights to public administrations on how open data can be utilised for evidence-based policy decision making and evaluation This work evolved in the context of the project Policy Compass (http://policycompass.eu/), a project co-funded by the EC within FP7, Grant agreement no: 612133.

The managerial trend of empowering workforces requires mobile workers to rely on a high degree of teamwork in a changing environment. An intelligent agent enhances the provision of cooperative services by adopting a component-based approach, increasing accessibility to mobile workers in the field.

Even after more than a decade of intensive research work in the area of electronic government (e-government) adoption and diffusion, no study has yet undertaken a theoretical evaluation of research related to ‘e-government satisfaction'. The purpose of this study is to undertake a comprehensive review of the literature related to e-government satisfaction and adoption with a particular focus on the most critical factors and their manifested variables that influence user satisfaction in e-government. Usable data relating to e-government research were collected from 147 papers identified from the Scopus database and by manually identifying relevant articles from journals dedicated to e-government research such as Electronic Government, an International Journal (EGIJ), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) and Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy (TGPPP). A meta-analysis of existing e-government studies found that the majority of the construct relationships demonstrated a significant range of average summative correlation, and effect size, but the influence of perceived ease of use, effort expectancy on behavioural intention, behavioural intention on use behaviour, and perceived trust on risk were still found to be non-significant. A broader analysis of e-government satisfaction and adoption research seems to reflect that although a large number of theories and theoretical constructs were borrowed from reference disciplines such as Information Systems, e-commerce and public administration, their utilisation by e-government researchers appears to be largely random in approach.

One of the main research issues in supply chain management is to improve the global efficiency of supply chains. However, the improvement efforts often fail because supply chains are complex, are subject to frequent changes, and collaboration and information sharing in the supply chains are often unfeasible. This paper presents a practical collaboration framework for supply chain management wherein multi-agent systems form dynamic information networks and co-ordinate their production and order planning according to synchronised estimation of market demands. In the framework, agents employ an iterative relaxation contract net protocol to find the most desirable suppliers by using data envelopment analysis. Furthermore, the chain of buyers and suppliers, from the end markets to raw material suppliers, form dynamic information networks for synchronised planning. This paper presents an agent-based dynamic information network for supply chain management and discusses the associated pros and cons.

The importance of supply chain management is increasing with globalization and the advancement of electronic business. Supply chains are dynamic due to frequent changes in suppliers, customers, and products. However, information systems for supply chains are not flexible enough to adapt to the changes, requiring high cost and time for re-implementation and re-customization. This paper suggests a flexible agent system for supply chains that can adapt to the changes in transactions introduced by new products or new trading partners. The flexible agent system consists of an interpretable conversation policy model, a procedure for exchanging new conversation policies, and a mechanism for actual transactions with newly acquired conversation policies. By using the flexible agent system, formation of supply chains becomes more robust to the dynamic changes. To show how the approach can be realized, a PC supply chain application is illustrated with a prototype agent platform.

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications.

This paper describes an agent-based approach for developing a location-based asynchronous group decision-support system for mobile teams. The approach maximises the use of reusable service components (GSCmas — generic service component for multi-agent systems) as the main interaction mechanism between agents to allow flexible support of a new group-decision process. The paper describes the architecture of a GSCmas and provides details of how the GSCmas is integrated within a decision support system. Finally a system (mPower) based on the proposed approach is introduced and applied to a location-based group decision problem.

This paper examines the conditions under which exploration of a new, incompatible technologyis conducive to firm growth in the presence of network externalities. In particular, this study is motivated by the divergent evolutions of the PC and the workstation markets in response to a new technology: reduced instruction set computing (RISC). In the PC market, Intel has developed new microprocessors by maintaining compatibility with the established architecture, whereas it was radically replaced by RISC in the workstation market. History indicates that unlike the PC market, the workstation market consisted of a large number of power users, who are less sensitive to compatibility than ordinary users. Our numerical analysis indicates that the exploration of a new, incompatible technology is more likely to increase the chance of firm growth when there are a substantial number of power users or when a new technology is introduced before an established technology takes off.

The limited literature on Open Source Software (OSS) customers’ adoption does not provide explanations on how OSS services are adopted by customers in the presence of functionally superior commercially licensed software (CLS). This paper aims to uncover the process that shapes customer satisfaction of OSS services in comparison to CLS. Expectation Disconfirmation Theory (EDT) is adapted and integrated with pre implementation factor model that influences software customers’ expectations including cost, reputation, and experience. The constructed research model is empirically validated using a field survey of OSS and CLS database management system (DBMS) customers in Korea. The theoretical contribution of the paper lies on the application of EDT to explain the wide adoption of OSS DBMS services in the presence of functionally superior CLS DBMSs. Furthermore, this paper integrates EDT with pre-implementation factors for customers’ expectations, which has been considered a limitation of the theory. Among the practical contributions, this study draws attention to the substantive differences between OSS and CLS customers’ expectations. Additionally, it offers initial explanations for the differences in customer behavior for OSS and CLS and the way that customers’ expectations and actual performance are mingled together to form customer satisfaction.